1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to management of various healthcare resources and healthcare facilities in a healthcare environment, and more particularly to, a method and system for facilitating automated navigation in a healthcare environment. The invention is particularly useful in assisting patients in navigating in a healthcare facility.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, a healthcare environment includes various healthcare resources, departments, healthcare facilities, clinicians etc located at different locations in the healthcare environment. For example, diagnostic labs, diagnostic equipments, emergency patient care room, admission and discharge section, billing facility, clinicians etc may be scattered at different parts of a hospital. Many times, in a healthcare environment such as hospital, the patient or the caretaker has to move from one locality to another, multiple times.
Mostly, the patient or the caretaker will consult a hospital staff to navigate to a desired destination. In a healthcare facility, there may be signboards indicating direction to various departments. But these signs boards give the patients or the caretaker an obtuse or vague navigation information and the patient may miss his way, as the intuitive details are not available.
Some of the hospitals have maps displayed indicating locations of various healthcare facility and resources. However if the patient is new to the hospital or if not able to understand the map or instructions provided along with it, the display of maps will not be helpful.
Further, the signboards and maps displayed are difficult to update and many times the maps or displays convey wrong navigation information to the patient, as they may not have been updated periodically.
Some of the solutions suggest, providing tracking devices with the patient as well as at the destination location. This will help, if the patient is in trauma and needs to locate a destination urgently. The tracking devices communicate with each other and the patient is navigated to the destination automatically. However, this requires providing tracking devices with the patient as well as at the destination and a server for managing the communication between them. Since the tracking devices are expensive and the information from both the tracking devices are required to navigate the patient efficiently, the process become more complicated and expensive. Thus it will be beneficial to have a simple and cost effective method for navigating in a healthcare environment.
Thus there exists a need to provide an improved method and system for navigating in a healthcare environment.